What Digital Identity Should Look Like Today

I am uniquely me. For the purposes of this post, I mean that I am a 30 year old woman (although frankly this Britney Spears song is resonating atm) who values and identifies with the preferences of an 80 year old man. A man who likes cigars, leather bound books, scotch, politics, and civility (no intentional oxymoron), to be clear. I know I must not be the only woman who appreciates these things, but I typically find myself an anomaly in these pursuits. This makes me unique in my own way, defining me in real life and online.

These unique habits, characteristics, and patterns that I exhibit as a user of the internet are valuable to businesses. If they understand what books I like to read and how I like to dress, the better they can sell to me. If they know where and when I like to travel, the better they can advertise to me. If they know when and how I use the internet, the better they can target me. And I’ve had enough of it. I should own my me-ness.

Beyond this, the companies I have interacted with have everything they could need to impersonate me – they have this data for every single one of us. Who doesn’t use Facebook as a single sign-on (SSO) for websites that make it easy to log in by using your Facebook account? What about all the sites that store your payment details, your address, name, phone number, and email? Even our passport information that we input when we check in online for flights is stored somewhere by someone whose security measures I’m not sure of. Just look at what happened with the Equifax breach. In today’s age of technology, that is careless, and insane.

Our lives are built around digital social networks putting us at the whims of Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube. They have us between a rock and a hard place; you don’t want them to own your identity, but you might not have much of one if you’re not connecting with people via the internet using these platforms. Recently Facebook changed an API policy that determined how third-party applications could interact with Instagram. Overnight, many influencers lost a significant source of income because suddenly they were no longer able to sell to their followers as they had been doing. Beyond the affiliate sales aspect, our professional lives are largely built on who our digital connections are. I can’t tell you how beneficial twitter has been for me in building a personal brand, and many of the relationships I have are held there as follows, DMs, likes, and retweets. Those things count when, for example, it’s between you and a VC, reporter, or CEO.

Then there’s another layer to consider: our lives are imprinted on these networks and likely nowhere else. My life since 2012 has been largely documented on Instagram; my relationships, career moves, travels, friends, and tastes. I’ve changed laptops a couple times since then and don’t have a complete and chronological album of my Instagram pictures stored neatly somewhere. And Twitter may as well be considered my “smart” journal where I share my thoughts on things that don’t involve my dog or relationship. (Although I sometimes tweet about those things too.) If you were to read my Tweets since I joined Twitter in 2009, you’d really, really get to know me and see how I have evolved as a human – that’s 9 years of my life. The entirety of my twenties are on Twitter.

Shouldn’t we own all of this? Shouldn’t we have ownership over how we behave and what we create online? Frankly, we should own our data just so that companies can’t profit off of it. But further, we should own it because it is us. The time and effort that we have put into building our digital footprints allows us to function in today’s world – it’s our identity. What I’m not concerned with in this post is how the business model of social media networks could and should change – that’s a topic for another day. As Sheryl Sandberg recently said, users may have to pay for total privacy.

In an ideal world, identity management would work like this:

Users would own their data, their networks, and their content. When signing up for, or onto, a new platform, users would simply provide access to their encrypted data. Companies wouldn’t be able to see it or store it, just access it for purposes of verification and authentication. As a record, you could see exactly who accessed your data, what they accessed, and when.

Stored on a private, permissioned blockchain (giving public proof of private information), users’ data could be authenticated and verified, and stored in a secure way, eliminating concern of hacking and stolen identity. Kind of like a personal, digital vault that organizations can plug into and access what they need, but not leverage it or profit off of any of the data stored inside.

The digital vault would also store all of the content that you create online, creating a secure, chronological history of your content so that you have a record of your life on the internet. It would also have an imprint of your social network, archiving and updating the connections we make each day.

The idea is that a gateway would be provided, acting as a consumer-friendly interface for your data but not acting as a third party that is managing data on the consumer’s behalf.

How would this all work? Would it be accessible via your mobile device? I think yes, I can’t see another reasonable way. Would data be stored in a wallet? I don’t know. Technically, there is a lot, a lot, more to be said about this, but that’ll come in another post as I try to figure out how this solution would best work. No ETA on that, I’m not technical by background, so this is an idea I’m working to understand and develop.

I don’t know exactly what is feasible at this point, but I think it’s an effort worth making. What I do know is that it’s about time we owned what makes us “us” online and take our information away from corporations who take advantage of it without protecting it.

Would love to know your thoughts. If you think I’m off base, let me know. If you have some ideas on how this could work, let me know! Comment below – or send me an email.

Feature pic: me having breakfast at the University Club of Washington before heading to the Chamber of Digital Commerce‘s blockchain conference at Georgetown University in March.